La Dolce Vita

The Via Veneto! Paparazzi! Marcello! All these exclamations, like the title itself, became international buzzwords thanks to Federico Fellini’s three-hour panorama of Roman high and low life. The images of a Jesus statue carted by helicopter above the city, of Anita Ekberg walking through the Trevi Fountain in her evening gown, of Marcello Mastroianni (in his starmaking role) ending in moral exhaustion on a beach — they all made for unforgettable snapshots of a society in glamorous decay. After winning the Palme d’Or over Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring and Luis Buñuel’s The Young One, the movie became an international hit. In real dollars, it is still the top foreign-language film shown in the U.S. Paparazzo, by the way, was the name of the street photographer.